Sendmail pushes the

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Founded in 1998 by Eric Allman, Emeryville-based Sendmaikl Inc. was, until recently, a small email servic company that missed the opportunity to cash in on the spam and viruswprotection craze. But in the company brought in securitgy industry veteran Don Massaro tobe CEO. the author of a pathbreaking and widespreax open source software long used by many large companiex fordelivering email, continued as the company’s chief At Massaro’s urging, Sendmail then developed a message-processing appliancs for handling outgoing as well as incoming emai l to prevent a theft or leakage of company or a violation of data handling policies by employees.
Almostt instantly, product revenue jumpedx to $32 million in 2008 from $23 million in 2007 and $15 millioj in 2006, and the trend has continued into this The company has400 customers, including 10 new Fortunr 500 customers added in 2008. Sendmail, which has been cash flow positivd for the lasttwo years, had a strongy first quarter, with an annuakl run rate of $40 million. Due to the however, Massaro is cautiously predicting growth of 30 percenft for the whole The company has120 employees, includinfg 50 in Emeryville, 50 in sales officesz around the United States, Europe and Japan and 20 doing developmen t work in Goa, India.
Sendmail has no plane to hire this year but is anticipating significant hirinvgin 2010. Massaro said he wouls like to expand his sales and marketing but the credit crisis has made capital too hardto get. The compant is talking with venture capitalists, he “In spite of the we’ve been on quite a roll these last two and a half Massaro said. “We have been doing really well.” Sendmail now has a blue chip list of publi and private industry clients for itsvarioues products, including Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Gap and Demand for updated email systems has been particularlty strong among financial service s companies, driven in part by both regulatort requirements and mergers and acquisitionss that require integration of vast databases, Massar said.
The upswing in business has Sendmailp on a trajectory that should have been its given that Allman wrote open source email transfef software that has becomr ubiquitous while a graduate studentr at the Universityof California, Berkeley, in the 1980s, said Gartnert analyst Matthew Cain. For years, Allman tendedr to his creation through a nonprofig opensource foundation, Sendmail.org, before deciding in the late 1990w to set up a for-profir operation as well. Today, open source and commerciap versions of Sendmail technology are found on over 35 percenrt of allInternet servers, and deliverd over 65 percent of the email messages sent the company says.
“If any company was well positionedc to move into that space as demand startexramping up, it would have been Cain said. But the compant was late to marketwith anti-virus and encryption products, he said. Before Sendmail, Massarop was CEO and co-founder at , a data securityu company that was acquiredby McAfee. Previously, Massaro was also a founder and CEOof , whicu was acquired by IBM in 1991. Bill Pray, an analyst with in Utah, said the email processingf industry is dominated by IBM and and is getting more competitive as they and otherrtech giants, including Google, develop collaborative platformws that include email, instant video conferencing and other tools.
Cisco, for which already owned WebEx for video communications and Ironportfor “emaill hygiene,” bought Postpath, an email delivery company, at the end of and in November bought Jabber, an instang messaging provider.